Deutsche Bank annual meeting

Deutsche Bank chief executive (CEO) John Cryan told an annual shareholders' meeting on Thursday that both the bank's managers and supervisors were working to put Germany's biggest private lender "back on the road to growth."

For the first time since taking office in the summer last year, British-born Cryan addressed shareholders in German, saying the "journey is demanding," requiring enormous effort which, however, would be worth it.

Deutsche Bank has caused shareholder anger after reporting a colossal loss of 6.8 billion euros ($7.9 billion) last year as a result of numerous scandals and litigation cases in recent years.

Supervisory board chairman Paul Achleitner expressed his confidence in Cryan's strategy, who replaced Anshu Jain as co-chief in July 2015, and will become the bank's sole CEO after Jürgen Fitschen steps down at the end of the shareholder meeting.

"Our objectives are right, our path has been clearly defined and the new management board is making good progress along this path," Achleitner said, admitting, however, the bank was "not yet" where he wanted it to be.

Deutsche Bank reaffirmed its ambition of bringing down annual costs by five billion euros to below 22 billion euros by 2018. Moreover, management promised to resolve its legal woes as quickly as possible, facing as many as 6,000 different litigation cases, the provisions for which helped push it to last year's record loss.

uhe/jd (Reuters, dpa, AFP)